The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A TCS Editorial
At TCS, we realise this issue has profoundly affected many of our readers who may have close ties to this conflict. Our thoughts are with you. We are opening up submissions for those who would like to share their experiences and perspectives on this issue to be published in one, multi-authored piece designed to encourage people to hear from a variety of perspectives and counteract the echo chamber which can so easily lead to blindspots and misinformation. At the very least, we hope it encourages people to approach each other with as much kindness as possible. If you are interested in this please contact us at thecambridgestudent@hotmail.com.
Unsurprisingly, this article has no definitive answers to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Though this seems like an obvious fact, all too often, social media and, sadly, even mainstream media sources have stressed one side of the issue while neglecting the other. What I would like to provide here is not a definitive judgement of rights and wrongs, but a call for people to try and put compassion and understanding first, and for people to view this issue in its long and sad historical context.
To deal with the present incident – it is clear that both Hamas and the Israeli Government have committed criminal acts of war. Hamas launched their attack at 6:30 am on the 7th, targeting civilians and taking hostages, including the massacre of 260 Israeli civilians at the Supernova festival. The Israeli government responded quickly, launching retaliatory air strikes four hours later, and cutting all supplies of electricity, food and water on the 9th. Since then, the death toll has risen (roughly) to 2,750 Palestinian deaths and 9,700 injuries with 1,400 Israeli deaths and 3,400 injuries. On the 13th, Israel ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza for a land assault.
Throughout these events, both sides have been flagrantly disregarding international law. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) makes clear that, “[k]illing civilians and ill-treatment are prohibited by the Geneva Conventions” and that hostage taking is considered a war crime” and indeed the brutal nature of Hamas’ initial attack was far in excess of what is considered a breach of this provision. Israel’s response likewise has targeted civilians and has included the use of white phosphorus bombs which “violates the requirement under international humanitarian law to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian injury and loss of life”. Moreover, the Israeli evacuation order has been flagged as another war crime, namely forced population transfer or ethnic cleansing. Sadly, when posting on social media, too many people have been quick to point out one set of these war crimes but are quiet on the others.
Both sides, of course, have their justifications. For the Israeli Government and its supporters their response has been about first, security, and then the goal of wiping out Hamas. While a military response to attacks is understandable, the Israeli government has engaged in the language of revenge. Netanyahu’s promise in his statement that “all of Israel’s enemies will know that it was a terrible mistake to attack Israel” has already seen seemingly indiscriminate bombing of Gaza and the mass flight of Palestinians from Gaza, seriously undermining their stated focus on Hamas. For Hamas and its supporters, violent action is justified by the failure of peaceful protest (such as the Great March of Return) to alleviate suffering brought about by the Israeli Government’s policies. Though Gaza may no longer be physically occupied, it has been blockaded since 2007 with drastic effect. Hamas, however, is an organisation with a history of declared anti-Semitism, despite its updated and less extreme 2017 charter. There is, then, frequent divergence between stated justification and actual motivation on both sides.
It is important to note here that both the Israeli Government and Hamas represent increasingly extreme aspects of the two ‘sides’ in this conflict. Hamas has been in conflict with Fatah (formerly the PLO) since 2007 over issues such as sanctioning armed violence and a recognition of the State of Israel. Likewise, the Israeli government has become increasingly extreme in its policies towards Palestine. The appointment of Itamar Ben-Gvir in December 2022 has signalled a pattern of aggressive settler expansion and more frequent disregard for rules of respect around certain Muslim holy sites, such as the Al-Aqsa Mosque. This lurch to the right has also involved the weakening of judicial checks on the government which produced mass protests from Israelis.
You may be noticing I am choosing my words carefully, especially my emphasis on ‘Hamas’ and the ‘Israeli government’. When we synonymize Israelis, and more sadly Jews, with the Netanyahu government we forget that they are simply people, fearing for their lives and loved ones. Equally, we do the same when Palestinians are synonymized with Hamas. This equation is all too frequently used to dismiss Palestinian claims to the right of statehood under the label of ‘terrorism’, a claim that too often fails to impress on Zionists who believe so strongly in the same right.
Crucially, generalising makes us forget that there is space between being ‘pro-Israel’ and ‘pro-Palestine’ for Israelis, Jews, and Palestinians who are critical of Israel and Hamas, believe in a free Palestine, have had nothing to do with the damage inflicted by both sides, and are now grieving. Indeed it ignores the near 1.7 million Israeli Muslims and the complex history and identity of Palestinian Jews.
Inevitably this brings the discussion to the wider problem of Zionism, statehood and history. It would be naïve to try and provide a history of the conflict here; there is not enough space and I do not have enough knowledge. But, if there is a key lesson to be learnt in the historical context, it is perhaps provided by the Israeli writer Amos Oz. He suggests the tragedy is that this is "a clash between one very powerful, deep and convincing claim and another very different but no less convincing, no less powerful, no less humane claim.”
For anti-Zionists and others rightly critical of the way in which the Israeli state was founded and expanded since 1948, this can be a difficult claim to accept. And, while Oz was certainly guilty of the blindspots of a Liberal Israeli in his analysis of the conflict, I think he points us to a very real truth. The state of Israel is not going away. Indeed, when one thinks about Israelis born today with families stretching back generations, or indeed the generations of Jews forced to flee persecution, abuse and genocide (with the period from the 1880s to the 1940s bringing wide-spread anti-Semitism and expulsion), one can begin to understand why Israeli Jews see their homeland as vital. It is not coincidental that Jewish migration to Palestine and the desire for an Israeli state grew extensively during the 1920s-1940s - a period of rising fascism and anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust.
This understanding, however, should not blind us to the way in which Palestinians have been made to suffer because of this: forced from their own homeland under the pretence that they were ‘Arabs’ not ‘Palestinians’ and thus could go elsewhere. Key Zionist figures, like Moshe Sharett, argued that Palestinians could just as easily “find their own national self-expression in Iraq, Arabia, and Trans-Jordan”. This negation of a specific Palestinian ethnic identity continues to be pervasive, with Ron DeSantis being the latest to express it. Since then, the history of Israel’s expansion has consistently involved the killing and dislocation of Palestinians. Indeed, the state of Israel today is such that writers like Benjamin Pogrund, who previously resisted claims of Israel as an apartheid state, has warned that “the accusation is now becoming fact”. A full appreciation of this brutal ‘state-building’ is important in understanding why some have become more sympathetic to violent action against the Israeli government. We must be wary of the way in which ‘respectability politics’ - where Palestinian organisations seek to avoid any controversy to try and gain recognition in Israeli politics - helps to legitimise the narratives and demands made by the Israeli state, downplaying and obscuring its violent history. Nonetheless, there are varying degrees of violent resistance, and Hamas' massacres of Israeli civilians are unjustifiable, even if one accepts that violent resistance can be legitimate.
Where this leaves us is the reality that this conflict is unlikely to be resolved in any way other than a ‘two-state solution’, an idea often resisted implicitly by Israelis and Palestinians. Sadly, some still equate recognising the state of Palestine as legitimising the demands of those who have killed Israeli citizens. Others publically espouse support for two states, but often show little practical effort towards producing it. Perhaps more understandably, many Palestinians have reservations about recognising a state responsible for their own statelessness and the conditions they now suffer. However, to many Israelis this has become evidence of Palestinian intransigence. Yet, neither Israelis nor Palestinians will ever relinquish their claims to statehood, so there will be no other solution that does not necessitate more violence and death.
I won’t go any further in this direction but will end simply by saying that above all we should remember that people around us are going through very real hurt and grief. We must let compassion lead our discussion and be aware that some may not be in a position to have it as they deal with losing loved ones.
